The Screengrab : mia farrow

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 18-24, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

What’s happening, Screengrabbers? My buddy here and I decided to take this opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about our forthcoming summer blockbuster, which you all will love very much. We were very disturbed to read Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009 (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six), particularly the part where Land of the Lost was predicted to be the biggest bomb of the summer! Sure, the previews may have given some people the impression that our movie is just another big budget crapfest of a cash-in, but believe you me, nothing could be further from the truth! We have the utmost respect for the original piece. We’re simply reimagining it in contemporary terms, as you might, say, with a modern-dress version of Hamlet. Or Bewitched!

While we’re here, we might as well check out some other stuff that looks interesting, like The Great Netflix-"Crash" Mystery (never saw it), Mia Farrow Plans to Fast for Darfur (looks like she already is, am I right?) and Angelina Jolie Plays Doctor (I’d like to turn my head and cough, if you know what I mean).

That’s all I’ve got time for, but my pal the Sleestak is gonna stick around and read:

Reviews: Tyson, Treeless Mountain, Il Divo, Infestation

Screengrab Q&A: James Toback

Charlie Kaufman Would You Like to Know That He Really Does Care About @#$%ing Structure!

Reviews By Request: Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

Forgotten Films: "The Daytrippers" (1987)

Marathon Day Special: The Longest Movies of All Time

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: John Belushi's "Noble Rot"

Mia Farrow Plans to Fast for Darfur

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:30:00 GMT

If you're planning to swing by Mia Farrow's place next week, don't bring chocolates. The actress, most recently seen in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, is embarking on a hunger strike "to show solidarity with the people of the war-hit Darfur region of Sudan" and to protest the decision by the Sudanese government to expel foreign aid agencies. In addition to her movie career, Farrow is a goodwill ambassador for Unicef. In a statement, Farrow, 64, decried "a world that is somehow able to stand by and watch innocent men, women and children needlessly die of starvation, thirst and disease," saying, "I undertake this fast in the heartfelt hope that world leaders who know what is just and right will call upon the government of Sudan to urgently readmit all of the expelled agencies or otherwise insure that the [aid distribution] gap is filled." Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir expelled thirteen aid groups last March after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.

In her statement, Farrow called on others to express solidarity with her cause by fasting, "if only for one day." Farrow herself has expressed determination to fast for as long as she can. "Doctors estimated that, given her slim build, this would be for a maximum of three weeks."

How Much Is Woody Allen's Good Name Worth? American Apparel Replies, "What Good Name?"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

"What is this," Woody Allen asks in Love and Death after receiving a couple of hard pats to the cheek, "Slap Boris Day?" Almost 35 years since writing that deathless scene, Allen may be feeling a little slap-happy himself. As we reported here a year ago, Allen is suing American Apparel for having used his likeness in its advertising without his permission. The case is only now coming to a boil, and in court papers filed yesterday, representatives for Allen complained that American Apparel has “adopted a ‘scorched earth’ approach”, threatening to drag his name through the mud, bringing up details of the disastrous, tabloid-friendly end of this relationship with Mia Farrow back in 1992. At worst, the company is clearly intent on doing its best to reward Allen for dragging them into court by making his left absolutely miserable. (Little do they know: he seems to kind of like it that way.) At, well, other worst, their official position appears to be that Allen is such an unredeemed slimeball that he has no rights at all, either as a human being or a marketable image. "“Certainly," says American Apparel lawyer Stuart Slotnick, "our belief is that after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America’s desire to have Woody Allen endorse their product is not what he may believe it is.”

Nasty comments about Woody the person are nothing new; once upon a time, Woody himself made his living as a chief dispenser of them. (Did you hear about the time he beat up the toaster?) But harsh judgements of the artist, though not unheard of, have a weird tendency to build to a sort of crescendo, then to fall away when he has an acclaimed international success big enough to count as a "comeback" (such as 2005's Match Point), only to rise up again, fiercer and more unforgiving than ever. A couple of weeks ago, in the course of lamenting the difficulty that Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks has had finding a distributor, Danny Leigh in the Guardian really stuck the knife in: "[Ferrara] and we are left with the exact inverse of the fate of that other New York institution, Woody Allen: a veteran director making films that deserve to be seen, but which no matter how good simply can't get into cinemas." No offense to Ferrara, who is one of our favorite New York street crazies with a camera, but if Vincent Canby were to rise from the dead, the discovery that anyone in the English-speaking world could get away with suggesting that anything his beloved Woody made might have less reason to be shown than anything from the director of New Rose Hotel would only kill him all over again, just so he could spin in his grave. (Vincent Canby is dead, isn't he? I'm trying to cut back on the number of times a day that I have to go running to Wikipedia.)

Another Guardian writer, Andrew Pulver, ain't having it. Pulver writes that "what really makes me sad is that it's now so easy, and so acceptable, to give Allen a hard time. His faltering output in recent years has coincided with a general perception that he's foolish (at best) and a sleazebag (at worst). Of course we can advance arguments that an artist's life shouldn't be confused with their work, but Allen didn't help himself by regularly casting himself opposite nubile young actresses. (Thank God he seems to have packed that in.) He seemed wilfully to want to confuse the two himself; just like, in his 'early, funny' period, he used to get tetchy at people who seemed to think the nebbishy little characters he played on screen could be anything at all like the real Woody Allen. (How could anyone have got that idea?) I prefer to remember the glory days."

It is an honorable sentiment, and it perhaps speak well to the dense variety of Allen's output in the last forty years that we will be able to spend forever arguing about which days those were. (Pulver thinks that Allen's hot streak fell between 1979's Manhattan and Husbands and Wives, his last film with Farrow, which was released into the teeth of the media flare-up over their domestic messiness.) "Now, as the likes of Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood (his direct peers) have put their rowdy youth and questionable escapades behind them, and are relaxing into elder-statesmanship, Allen is heading the other way" in terms of his reputation and public image. That may be a bit much. (And it definitely fails to acknowledge that so many people felt betrayed, and therefore comfortable to judge Allen's morality, back in 1992 because he fell from such a high place in terms of personal reputation: however he compares to Scorsese or Eastwood as a filmmaker, he was, at his peak, an intellectual culture hero of a kind that they never were.) Ultimately, Allen's reputation, like that of every prolific major filmmaker, shifts a little with every new movie he turns out. Which way will it shift after his new Larry David picture sees the light of day? We've got our fingers and toes crossed.

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)

If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)

Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.

ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)

When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.

ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)

An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.

ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)

The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.

DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.

ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Video of the Day: "Mia and Roman"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Inspired by our commenter "TB" (we know who you are, sir) on Phil Nugent's earlier Roman Polanski post, here is Mia and Roman for your viewing pleasure. Said esteemed commenter describes this treasure as a "must-see, unintentionally hilarious and often repellent short film...a studio puff-piece intended as a tribute to the friendship between two free-spirited artists and rebels who color outside the lines, etc., but its main effect is to show Mia up as a blue-ribbon narcissist and dilettante." Judge for yourself!

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )

As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay! We know you read this feature religiously! Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!) She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name: I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938 - )

You might have noticed that the first clip is in Italian sans subtitles. But I make no apologies for including it! Still, I love you, dear Screengrab reader, almost as much as I love Claudia Cardinale, so there’s a second clip, this time with subtitles, of Ms. Cardinale being charming. Now here’s an amazing fact: both of these films (The Leopard and 8 1/2, that is) are from the same year. You might have noticed that Cardinale is one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen. You might have noticed that these clips are from two of the finest films in Italian cinema. You are quite observant!

GENEVIEVE BUJOLD (1942 - )

Bujold got her first big break co-starring with Yves Montand in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie; that movie opened up possibilities in French films that she spurned to star in two godawful independent Canadian productions, Isabel and The Act of the Heart, that were directed by filmmaker and jackass Paul Almond, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973. This detail set the tone for much of her career: a great actress with the ability to make direct contact with an audience, Bujold spent the seventies being courted by Hollywood studios and touted in the press as a big star in the making, but she kept slipping away from the bonds of real fame by her insistence on doing the roles she wanted to do. (One big exception was Earthquake, in which she played Charlton Heston's girlfriend as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Universal Pictures for breach of contract.) During her ingenue period, she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in her first U.S. picture, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), then slipped away to Greece to contribute a stunning cameo as Cassandra in the Michael Cacoyannis film of The Trojan Women (1971), had a freak-out scene for the ages in Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and came as close as she would ever come to mainstream stardom in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978). In her mature-actress period, she stirred strange longings in Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984), stirred even stranger ones in Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988), and introduced some experience and earthiness to Alan Rudolph's soap-bubble worlds in Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), and The Moderns (1988). It's been a while since she was in anything that anybody saw, but she is never to be counted out and it's good to know that she's still out there, waiting for some young hotshot director who isn't afraid of writing a part for a strong woman to do himself a favor.

MAGGIE CHEUNG (1964 - )

Born in Hong Kong, Cheung later moved with her family to the U.K. when she was eight, which accounts for the British accent with which she spoke her English dialogue in the French film Irma Vep (1996), directed by her sometime husband Olivier Assayas. Her dry, witty performance in that movie as some version of herself, politely standing around between takes on a movie set while an assistant with a spray bottle applies the right sheen to her shiny black cat suit, was a measure of how far she'd come since her early days in movies: a former model and First Runner-Up in the Miss Hong Kong beauty contest (who beat her? who the fuck beat her!?), Cheung can be seen not doing much besides looking damned good in a number of HK films, including such Jackie Chan classics as Police Story and Project A Part II. Cheung has given credit for her emergence as an actress to Wong Kar-wei, master of all things beautiful, who brought her out in As Tears Go By and later used her in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. While developing her talent, Cheung has also managed to maintain a presence in the Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema, co-starring in such films as The Heroic Trio and Green Snake; both strands of her career came together triumphantly in Zhang Yimou's Hero, where she kicked ass and broke hearts with the best of them. She gave her finest dramatic performance to date in her most recent film, Assayas's Clean, for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. She has since announced that she's quitting acting to concentrate on her music. Her fans can be forgiven for hoping that she eventually finds composing to be insufficiently gratifying to her ego and comes slouching back.

MIA FARROW (1945)

The daughter of film director John Farrow (The Big Clock) and actress and Tarzan main squeeze Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow burst into the late '60s with a waif-like quality that, married to her china doll features, was at its best sexily androgynous and at its not-best borderline elfin. She became a star from her role in the TV series Peyton Place, which she quit at the behest of her new husband, Frank Sinatra; she then blew off the marriage to Sinatra by refusing to give up her starring role in Rosemary's Baby. That movie made her an even bigger star, but it also raised the possibility that she might wind up being exploited in picture after picture as the most defenselessly threatenable potential victim since the days of silent melodrama. Perhaps alert to this danger, she spent most of the next ten years alternating between very bad choices (Secret Ceremony, The Great Gatsby) and, so far as a movie career was concerned, making no choices at all. In 1978, she appeared as a member of ensemble casts in Robert Altman's A Wedding and the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile and, in both, revealed a new eagerness to subvert audience's sympathetic expectations of her and to use her own weirdness for comic effect. It wasn't long after that she took up with Woody Allen, and starting with 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, embarked on a ten-year stretch where she appeared almost exclusively in his movies. In the best of them, he examined every angle from which she could be charming, and she has him to thank for having broadened and solidified her enduring screen image. There's a whole lot of other stuff he did for which she has not been inclined to thank him, and when their professional and personal relationships both ended with an abrupt thud around the time of the release of 1992's Husbands and Wives, she hurtled out of his orbit and latched onto supporting roles in other people's movies with what looked an awful lot like relief. From the first of her post-Woody movies, John Irvin's Widow's Peak (1994) to the most recent, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, she can generally be counted on to serve as a delightful addition to any project that is salvageable and as something fascinatingly odd in any project that isn't. Last year, Time magazine named her as one of the world's most influential people for her various humanitarian endeavors.

DIANE KEATON (1946 - )

Keaton's warmth and talent, and her special ability to make neurosis seem cuddly, made her everybody's favorite screen comedienne in the seventies, when she starred with her off-screen partner Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper (where she did a mean Brando impression), Love and Death, Manhattan, and of course, Annie Hall, which made her not just a star but a zeitgeist figure. Although she's kept working since that peak -- unlike other actresses, such as Jill Clayburgh, who seemed to embody something very much of the moment for, well, a moment -- there's a sense that Keaton doesn't really get her full due, maybe because her moment is supposed to have passed. (She's always criticized for being too "contemporary" when she plays period roles, even though she's been brilliant in such movies as Mrs. Soffel, where she springs Mel Gibson from a Pittsburgh jail at the turn of the century, and, of course, Reds.) Even when her career was red-hot after her Oscar win for Best Actress in Annie Hall, her success in comedy and the relative dullness of her role in the Godfather movies led to a false impression that she's a funny woman wasted in heavy drama. This may have led to her being overpraised for her work in the strident Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which came out the same year as Annie Hall, but it also cost her full recognition for her greatest performance, in the stunning divorce drama Shoot the Moon in 1982. She also gave a wrenching performance in The Little Drummer Girl, reasserted her comedic chops carrying Baby Boom to the finish line, partnered beautifully with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek for Crimes of the Heart, re-teamed with Woody Allen for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and directed for TV (including episodes of Twin Peaks) and movies (including the oddball documentary Heaven and the underrated Unstrung Heroes). She also helped produce Gus Van Sant's Elephant and dabbled in real estate. Her biggest recent splash in movies was in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, where she has a nude scene, the point of which was the horror that the sight of a naked woman only a decade younger than him inspired in her co-star Jack Nicholson. In fact, she looked pretty good -- certainly better than Nicholson does with his clothes on -- and her performance (and unsurgically enhanced body) helped make the movie a hit among women who enjoyed seeing Keaton getting hit on by Keanu Reeves. She can now be seen in TV commercials as the face of L'Oreal.

MAE WEST (1893-1980)

Mae West was beautiful, talented, versatile, and groundbreaking. Big deal. So were a million other women who don’t have nearly the reputation she does in the history of Hollywood. The reason that we’re writing about Mae West is because she took what was implicit in showbiz and made it explicit: her career, from beginning to end, was all about sex. Never before had anyone become so famous speaking so openly about what goes on between men and women – and she didn’t limit it to that paradigm, either. West was sexually experimental and was rumored to have had affairs with a number of women; and, despite the greater fag-hag veneration of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, she was also one of the earliest advocates of gay rights, having written a sympathetic play about homosexual men as early as 1928. Oh, yeah: she was a writer, too. Always more than just a pretty face and a round set of hips, West was an engaging speaker, a witty and talented writer, and by all accounts, a legendarily adept improviser. (She said one of her greatest regrets is that she never got to share the screen with Groucho Marx, the only comic she considered her equal at thinking on one’s feet.) Like most people who considered sex a serious business, she couched much of her speculations about it in humor, but that didn’t save her from being repeatedly censored, censured, prosecuted (at least twice successfully) for obscenity, and banned from half the radio and television networks in the country. West never stopped working, and while her latter-day projects like Sextette are often considered more creepy than funny, considering that she kept her career going for some 70 years while pioneering gay rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom some thirty years before the rest of the country came around, we’d say she earned a little indulgence.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, & Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Summer of '78: "A Wedding"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

All summer long we’ve been flipping back the calendar to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse thirty years ago. Today is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and the official grand finale of…The Summer of ’78!

A Wedding

Release Date: August 29, 1978

Cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow

The Buzz: If your only problem with Nashville was that you thought there just weren’t enough characters – have we got a movie for you!

Keywords: Wedding, Dancing, Dental Braces, Unplanned Pregnancy, Frog, Greenhouse

The Plot: This is about as plotless as it gets, even by Robert Altman standards. The title is no lie – it’s a wedding. The ceremony takes up the first 15 minutes or so, as feckless Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) is married to braces-wearing daughter of privilege Muffin Brenner by near-senile Bishop Martin (John Cromwell). The matriarch of the groom’s family (Lillian Gish) dies while awaiting the reception guests at the family manse, but her demise is concealed by the family doctor. As at any wedding reception, numerous subplots unfold as the alcohol flows. Mother of the bride Tulip (Carol Burnett) is wooed by guest Mac Goddard (Pat McCormick). Dino is accused of impregnating the bride’s sister Buffy (Mia Farrow), much to the dismay of her overly attentive father Snooks (Paul Dooley). Exes of both bride and groom turn up to complicate matters, as does a tornado. Events take a seemingly tragic turn as it appears the happy couple is killed in a car accident en route to their honeymoon, but it turns out it was just their exes leaving together in the car meant as a wedding present – so who cares?

The Test of Time: During the production of 3 Women, a reporter asked a badly hungover Altman what his next project would be. “We’re shooting a wedding,” he snapped. It figures that a project based on an offhand sarcastic comment would end up being one of the director’s lesser efforts. In a DVD commentary (and in several interviews), Altman lays out his basic plan for the film: first, he wanted to double the number of characters from his most ambitious effort, Nashville. And he wanted the near real-time film to catalogue the follies of the typical wedding, when two families and sets of friends are thrust into an artificial union. It could have worked, but the delicate Altman alchemy fizzled this time around. All the usual tics are present – zoom-ins and –outs, overlapping dialogue, actor improvisation – but the magic just isn’t happening. Part of the blame goes to the cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr. and company aren’t exactly the Nashville A-list. But blame Altman for crowding so many of them into such a confined space and time. We spend too much time trying tell the bridesmaids and distant relatives apart, and by the time we’ve figured it out, few of the storylines are compelling enough – or developed enough – to command our attention. There is the odd worthy moment – a handful of wedding workers and guests passing a joint around outside the greenhouse as the dusky mist descends – but the disproportionately dark denouement is a downer that sums up the cynicism of the whole endeavor. Robert Altman made at least a half-dozen of my all-time favorite movies, so it’s pretty easy for me to shrug off his missteps. Still, the summer of ’78 sure ended with a bummer of A Wedding.

Quotable Quote: “You mean you don’t drink? In other words, when you get up in the morning, that’s as good as you’re gonna feel all day.”

2008 Equivalent: There will never be another Altman.

Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!

Previously on Summer of '78: The Driver

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we here at the Screengrab called on YOU, the good people of Blogtopia, to let us know what Top Ten Lists you’d like to see us forget to include your favorite movies on...and, lo, it came to pass that we did verily discuss the finest farewells and most ignominious exits in the annals of cinema o’er the previous fortnight at the behest of one “Other Matt.” (Sorry, I just got back from the free outdoor Boston Common production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and I'm still feeling a little iambic.)

Anyway, this week, we’ve taken the suggestion of just plain “Matt” (presumably the original Matt and possibly Other Matt’s Batman-esque nemesis): ten great scenes that really deserved to be in better movies!

"Kickapoo" from TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY (2006)

It’s difficult to describe to the uninitiated what a colossal disappointment the Tenacious D movie turned out to be. If you’ve only seen the movie or heard a handful of songs, it would be easy to dismiss the portly duo (Jack Black and Kyle Gass) as a comic novelty act. But the fans knew better, getting hooked on the endlessly re-watchable HBO series and frequenting D concerts. And with Pick of Destiny, it felt like their dream had finally come true: a fitting vehicle for the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Band.” Then they actually saw the movie, at which point all hope came crashing down, leaving D fans no choice but to trudge home and forlornly listen to “Fuck Her Gently” over and over again. But before that could happen, the movie’s opening scene actually delivered everything the fans had always hoped for...namely, a kickass rockin’ D musical. The “Kickapoo” number (an all-sung origin story featuring Meat Loaf as the Bible-thumping father of young Jables and Ronnie James Dio as a diabolical mentor) promises so much more than even a good movie could possibly deliver. Which, of course, makes it all the more disappointing that the movie that follows barely even seems to try, even jettisoning Meat Loaf and Dio altogether and retreating to the relatively safe template of stoner comedy. But for five minutes, it’s pure Tenacious D bliss, the foul-mouthed, Jim Steinman-esque rock opera the fans deserved, rather than the sub-Cheech’n’Chong antics they ended up getting.

That long-ass alley brawl from THEY LIVE (1988)

John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi allegory wasn't a terrible movie by any means; it was your basic, meat-and-potatoes B-movie, the ideal bottom half of a drive-in double bill back when such things existed. (There is dissent in the Screengrab bullpen about this evaluation, with at least one colleague proclaiming They Live to be "totally awesome," but in my book such praise is reserved for movies that don't star "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.) But Carpenter's movie does have its moment of greatness…well, actually it's a hell of a lot longer than a moment. Piper's Nada, a laborer who finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see hidden messages in billboards and hidden aliens inside seemingly normal people, wishes to share his discovery with his co-worker Frank (Keith David). Frank declines. When a sensible discussion of the issue fails to bear fruit, fisticuffs ensue. And ensue. And ensue. For nearly six minutes, Piper and David beat the crap out of each other in an alley, and every time you think they're finished, reduced to nothing more than heaves and grunts, they start all over again. It's not that their fight is some brilliantly choreographed ballet of action – its brilliance (and hilarity) lies in its single-minded relentlessness.

Jack & Sam's hellacious squabble from HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992)

It was a perfect storm for Woody Allen in 1992: his personal life was splattered all over the tabloids, and his new movie came packaged with provocative similarities to the headlines. Most critics were quick to slap a label reading "Woody's latest masterpiece" on Husbands and Wives, praising the shaky camera work, jump-cuts and foul language as well as the perceived highly personal subject matter. This was a breakthrough, a new raw, down-and-dirty Woody Allen – except for those of us who saw it as the same old Allen with a derivative, migraine-inducing stylistic tic wholly unsuited to his Upper East Side world. Sure enough, it didn't take long for Woody to revert to his tried-and-true long master shots and PG-13 dialogue, but there is one scene in Husbands and Wives that delivers a short, sharp shock of the rawness Allen was targeting. It doesn't involve his character or Mia Farrow at all – and you could speculate that Allen couldn't bring himself to completely abandon his audience's affections, though I've seen too many of his subsequent films (Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else) to make that mistake – but rather the late Sydney Pollack in the role that really turned the remainder of his career towards acting rather than directing. As Jack (the best friend role that had often gone to Tony Roberts or Michael Murphy in the past), Pollack is a married man romancing a younger woman, Sam (Lysette Anthony), described by Allen's character as a "fucking cocktail waitress." Pollack dismisses Allen's snobbery until Sam embarrasses him at an upscale party by voicing her New Age-y thoughts about tofu and astrology and whatnot. What follows is sort of the Woody Allen version of the They Live fight – a corrosive "let's get outta here" scene that escalates into a kind of mortifying slapstick.

Click here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak

Woody Allen Doesn’t Care What You Think

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

One reason Woody Allen drives critics crazy these days – aside from his increasingly flaccid self-parodies posing as new movies, of course – is that there’s nothing they can do to hurt him. One of the recurring character types in his “serious” efforts is the guy who gets away with murder, never to receive his comeuppance. Clearly a lot of people think Allen is that guy. It’s not so much that he survived the whole Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi contretemps; in Allen’s case, he keeps getting away with making movies that are murder to sit through.

The British papers are particularly harsh in this assessment, probably because the critically excoriated Cassandra’s Dream is just now reaching London theaters. Interviewing Allen for The Times, James Mottrom comes off as a man beating his heat against a brick wall. ““I never think about a film once it’s finished and I’m almost finished filming another one,” Allen says, responding to a question about the Cannes premiere of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “I never give it a second thought. It was finished last summer and now it’s this summer.” When asked about his lack of critical support in recent years, the Woodman shruggeth. ““I haven’t read a word regarding myself or my films in over 30 years…I have no idea how they are regarded. Even from a financial point of view if one does well I’d never know as the money flows to my accountants – and I have no contact with them.”

Is he a man concerned with his legacy? ““I never have any idea what happens to my films after I put them out. I don’t know where they are released, what theatres they are in. Distribution of my movies falls into the category of business and I don’t have the slightest interest in their fate.” Has he improved as a filmmaker with time? ““I don’t see any reason why I should be any better now.”

In The Guardian, humorist-provocateur Joe Queenan issues a call to action: “Europe, please stop funding this man.” This is what really seems to get under Allen haters’ skin – it doesn’t matter how his films perform, there’s always someone lined up to finance another one, year after year after year. “Six years ago,” Queenan writes, “the New York Times published a front-page article reporting that only eight people had shown up at a Times Square cinema to see an afternoon screening of Woody Allen's new film, Hollywood Ending. To many of us, the number sounded a bit high; surely the eight included ushers, refugees seeking political asylum, undercover cops and vagrants…. Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen's interchangeably neurasthenic films. Europeans are the ones paying the freight for Allen's cavalcade of duds.”

Through it all, Allen remains unflappable. He’s currently shooting in New York for the first time in four years. You can’t stop him.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

Spielberg Talks Tough to Beijing

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Steven Spielberg has stepped down from his role as "artistic adviser" to the Beijing Olympics, in protest against the Chinese government's failure to use its influence to stop the Darfur genocide. In a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao that was released to the public last week, Spielberg wrote, "I add my voice to those who ask that China change its policy toward Sudan." Spielberg's decision comes a little less than a year after Mia Farrow, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, hit the Schindler's List director in the soft places by suggesting that for him "to sanitise Beijing's image" at a time when "China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide" would threaten to turn him into the modern equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl. Now that Spielberg has distanced himself from the Chinese government, Farrow told Slate's Kim Masters that she's thrilled about his having had what she calls "a Lillian Hellman moment." (Apparently Spielberg made the announcement while wearing his Blackgama fur and revealing that he had been the model for the character of Nora Charles.)

Masters reports that, "In response to the Spielberg news, a coalition of activist organizations promptly said they will run ads around the world decrying China's inaction. The next move will be pressuring corporate sponsors, including GE, McDonald's, and many other giant American corporations. Farrow is already asking the public to call these companies and speak out, and she has conveniently listed contact information on her Web site." All very admirable, though anyone who can remember, say, Tiananmen Square has to wonder if the Chinese government doesn't have a near-unique capacity for shaking off such things. Characteristically, the first reaction from the Chinese press has been to suggest that Spielberg is talking though his hat about complicated issues that he doesn't understand, though with conciliatory assurances that they think his chase scenes are great and his alien visitors darn cute.

Afternoon Deal Report: Strike is Over! (If You Want It)

Peter Smith — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:15:00 GMT

The Writers' Guild strike is over at last, and we all breathe a sigh of relief.

Steven Spielberg has pulled out of his role as artistic advisor to the Beijing Olympics, in an attempt to pressure the Chinese government into pressuring the Sudanese government (which profits enormously in oil sales to China) into ending the genocide. Undoubtedly, he's also responding to pressure from his own humanitarian critics, including Mia Farrow, who apparently warned him he could be compared to Leni Reifenstahl if he went ahead. Pressure all around, but if it pushes China to act, it's all for the good.

I love that Ashton Kutcher produces stuff. Nothing signifies quality and refinement like the Kutcher imprimatur, right? In any case, he's currently producing and starring (with Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the sex comedy Spread.

The line between History Channel programming and action film grows ever thinner, as Fox announces a deal to adapt the History Channel series Ice Road Truckers into a summer crash-bang-boom picture.